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It was a year ago today that the world lost my friend, student, training partner and, yes, teacher, Anwar Leonard.
I had no idea that much time had passed. I think of him often and I feel his absence constantly so in a sense, that moment of loss is still present and ongoing. It hit hard a couple of weeks ago when the news broke that Chris Cornell had taken his own life in Detroit. It wasn't so painful just because he was famous. It was painful because I am close to people who were close to him. One of the DJ's on KEXP that day described Seattle as not so much a small city as a big neighborhood and it's hard to go far without running into someone who has a great memory or story about Chris.

That was so true about Anwar.

His family took a couple of weeks to process as well as they could the loss of their son and then put one foot in front of the other and arranged a memorial. For the friends mostly... we needed to remember him out loud and we needed to let them know how muc…

So, recently I completed this piece. It's a self portrait... you may think everything i do is a self portrait and you may be right... but this is the first one that I actually tried to make in my own image.

And therein lies a tale...

Once upon a time there was a young, married couple (Padi and I). We lived in an apartment we shared with her longtime roommate, a spectacular orange and white tomcat by the name of Rick. Rick was an excellent cat, even tempered, tolerant, prone to purring rather than biting.

We called him Snackie. Y'know, because that's what he liked to eat.

He had watched over Padi for more than a dozen years and eventually made room for me in his household (for, who are we kidding, the cats run the joint). I liked him fine and I was under the impression he tolerated me, which is the best you can hope for when you're the new guy in the picture...

And then one night all that changed. He and I were surfing the couch while &…

It's been a challenging week. I had a day off. I needed a really good, big-ass roaring monster movie. Boy, did I pick the right one!

Kong: Skull Island is the best damned big monster movie I've seen in years. I saw Cloverfield. Liked it. Saw Godzilla. Pretty impressed. Saw Jurassic Whatever. Whatever. Skull Island takes a bunch of classic Big Ass Monkey tropes that we feel like we've seen a million times (Kong, two remakes, son of kong, Konga, Gorgo, Jurassic Parks... all of them, The Valley of Gwangi, both those Japanese King Kong movies), dusts them off, stands them up circa 1974 , thrills you and makes you care without giving you the same old monster with a heart of gold gets dragged out of his kingdom and brought low by ignorant greedy humans plot.

Granted, I got there late... Seattle traffic sucks... missed the first fifteen minutes or so, but the plot was clear enough that I could reverse engineer the intro for myself. Got there as the choppers were taking off fro…